Mental control of musical imagery: Comparing tonal and song stimuli.

Abstract

The authors would like to thank Kaitlyn Forgione, Raven Lee, and David Tripp for their assistance with this project. All imagery task stimuli and data are available on Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/jgf84/). A portion of these results were presented at the 2019 North Carolina Cognition annual meeting.

Mental control of musical imagery in the lab and everyday life: Combining behavioral and experience-sampling approaches.

“…We also consider the influence of musical training on mental control abilities in the lab and in daily life, as musicians often outperform nonmusicians on musical imagery control tasks (Cotter & Silvia, 2020b;Foster et al, 2013) The present research expanded the current literature in three ways. First, it provided an opportunity to examine the replicability of Cotter and Silvia's (2020a) examination of initiation and management abilities and differences in mental control ability for tonal and song stimuli using lab-based imagery tasks. Second, the present research explored people's perceptions of their ability to initiate and manage musical imagery in their everyday lives.…”

“…People completed 11 auditory imagery tasks previously developed and tested by Cotter and Silvia (2020a). An overview of the tasks is presented in Table 1, and specific details of the tasks are located in the online supplemental materials.…”

“…In this view, auditory imagery tasks that use musical stimuli require people to willfully initiate musical imagery to successfully participate in the task. The nature of tasks has varied considerably, with some requiring initiation of single tones or chords (Farah & Smith, 1983; Hubbard & Stoeckig, 1988); scales (Janata & Paroo, 2006); simple, short passages of music (Bailes, et al, 2012; Foster et al 2013; Halpern & Zatorre, 1999; Herholz et al 2008); or excerpts of popular music (Cotter & Silvia, 2020a; Weir et al 2015). Although the objectives of the tasks vary, participants must initiate imagery when asked to do so, providing support that people are able to initiate a variety of musical images at will.…”

“…Drawing on the strengths of each approach would benefit both literatures and our understanding of musical imagery. Using stimuli that more closely represents the contents of everyday musical imagery (e.g., pop songs; Bailes, 2015) would increase the ecological validity of auditory imagery research—this shift in stimuli has been seen in several recent projects (Bishop et al, 2013; Cotter & Silvia, 2020a; Jakubowski et al, 2015; Weir et al, 2015). The ecological musical imagery approach would benefit from increasing use of more objective assessments of musical in daily life.…”

“…The present research expanded the current literature in three ways. First, it provided an opportunity to examine the replicability of Cotter and Silvia’s (2020a) examination of initiation and management abilities and differences in mental control ability for tonal and song stimuli using lab-based imagery tasks. Second, the present research explored people’s perceptions of their ability to initiate and manage musical imagery in their everyday lives.…”